A business process or business method can be a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product, serve a particular goal for a particular customer or customers, or otherwise relate to operation of one or more functions of an organization. Business processes can be modeled, for example using one or more business objects based on metadata defined by one or more business applications.
In a typical business software system, metadata can be distributed into meta-object instances. For the purposes of this disclosure, metadata refers to data that characterizes other data, for example with regards to definition, structure, administration, and the like. Meta-objects are defined in a non-redundant manner and can be stored in a metadata repository. From a consumer perspective, a resulting view on a meta-object instance can be composed from several different meta-object instances, which can be characterized objects used to transfer data between software application components, subsystems, and system. Some examples of a resulting view on a metadata instance can include merging the metadata instance with one or many metadata extension instances (e.g. extensions added by service consumers), merging of metadata instance delta information in a business object projection with an underlying or standard business object template (e.g. to reflect dependencies between a dependent object and the standard business object template), including a reusable metadata instance part as a dependent object into one or several business objects to explicitly model that they share a common structure, and the like.